Diamond league: Host broadcaster FilmNova talks London Athletics Meet complications and choreography  

FilmNova was host broadcaster for UK Athletics’ London Athletics Meet – part of the Diamond League – on Saturday 20 July at the London Stadium

FilmNova recently bought coverage of the London Athletics Meet – part of the Diamond League that consists of 15 global athletics meetings – to viewers as the host broadcaster, on Saturday 20 July at the London Stadium. Producing the event on behalf of UK Athletics (UKA), which is the governing body of the sport in the UK, FilmNova delivered content for global rights holders.

We spoke to Phil Sibson, FilmNova managing director, about how the production company created the broadcast, and the technical innovations involved.

What are the key challenges and pressures you faced on this production? How did you overcome those?

Live athletics is a complicated sport to produce. Whilst all events are relatively straightforward to cover in isolation, there are multiple events going on in a stadium at the same time and you can’t show everything. At London, in addition to the track events there are also long jump, high jump, pole vault, shot put and javelin competitions.

So, as world feed athletics producers, the job is to show all the track races live, between those races tell the story of the field events, by showing all the key action as it happens, or in most cases just after it has happened.

At London, we were producing four feeds. The first is known as an integrated feed, which is a two hour programme based around the track timetable, but with action from the field events integrated into it telling the story of those field events. This is the feed that all rightsholders take over satellite.

Feeding into the integrated feed we have three field feeds, which are also available for rightsholders to receive over satellite should they wish to receive the field events in their entirety.

This means that in addition to a production team covering the track races, we have three further production teams providing live coverage of the field events.

NEP is our technical partner and they bought three NEP trucks: Sargasso housing the track and integrated production team; Aurora housing two field feeds; and Voyager housing the final field feed.

NEP was FilmNova’s technical partner for the London Athletics Meet. It bought three NEP trucks along for the broadcast

There’s a lot going on simultaneously with athletics, so how do you make it all work smoothly?

We work hard with the event presentation team to ensure that the timings for each event will work within the two hour timeslot that the Diamond League programme runs for. This is straightforward with the track schedule as you can be pretty precise with how long those races will take, but with some of the field events such as pole vault and high jump, it’s more open ended, so there is a balancing act to the scheduling between making sure the events are finished within the broadcast window, but also that they work as a spectacle for the 60,000 fans in the stadium.

FilmNova crew capturing the action at the Diamond League London Athletics Meet on 20 July 2024

As a further complication, obviously not all jumps and throws can take place on an athletics field simultaneously, so this also needs a level of choreography. The Diamond League standardly has five field events and in order to get all of them finished before the end of the programme, the javelin and shot put commence before the world feed goes live.

The benefit of this is that we only require three field feeds as the same field team directing javelin then direct high jump, and the same with the shot put team, directing long jump.

As a further safety net, we remain in close verbal contact throughout the event, both directly from our producer to the event presentation producer, and through our floor managers and the event technical team. This means, if we need an event held briefly because something has happened elsewhere we can ensure that happens, but equally, if an event is taking longer than is desired, we can get a message for the officials to try and speed things up.

What are the main innovations or coolest things you’re bringing into play for this production?

With the Diamond League, whilst we produce our own camera plan, there is a TV standards document that ensures the production levels have a consistency across the series and we work to that.

However, I think the Diamond League is doing some innovative and interesting things such as wavelight technology, which is LED lights embedded on the inside of the track, which help form a reference for athletes to know how close they are to record times. These are reflected in the onscreen graphics.

Graphics in athletics are evolving at a fast pace. On the distance races, it has been a huge step forward to see GPS providing positional places on screen, rather than needing to squint at a screen to spot an individual in a group of 10 or more runners, as used to be the case.

The Diamond League uses Swiss Timing to develop and provide graphics across the series, though in the interests of sustainability, local operators are used under one Swiss Timing supervisor. At London, we have contracted five local graphics operators from Moov.

Who else did you work with on this event?

It’s a real collaborative process that started as soon as we were appointed host broadcaster earlier this year. Firstly, the Diamond League and by extension IMG who manage their global media rights.

We then had a site visit attended by UK Athletics, the event owners who put on the event, the London Stadium, ourselves, NEP and BBC Sport. At that meeting we looked at camera placement and platforms, commentary tribunes, mixed zones and positions for the BBC to present from, as well as discussing everything from internet and access schedules to toilets and accreditation.

There is also a rightsholder portal from which any broadcasters who wish to have a presence onsite and book facilities, such as commentary units, internet, and space in the mixed zone can indicate their requirements for us to facilitate.

The planning is then ongoing until we arrive onsite, which in this case was on Wednesday [17 July] and culminates is a TV meeting the night before, which is a chance for us to run through protocols with event presentation and discuss any aspects of our running order that onsite broadcasters, such as the BBC might want more detail on.

FilmNova crew working live at the Diamond League London Athletics Meet from an NEP truck on site

Did you produce blanket coverage of this event?

Yes. We produced a host broadcast feed, which is full coverage of the athletics, with graphics and commentary.

The host broadcast needs to provide universal coverage for rightsholders, but it is normal for a domestic broadcaster to have a few of their own cameras. In this case it was the BBC, who have additional cameras such as a head-on that can focus on British athletes, but also a studio in the stadium and their own presentation team of Gabby Logan, Jess Ennis-Hill, Denise Lewis, and Paul Radcliffe. They also have their own commentators and Jeanette Kwakye providing trackside interviews from the mixed zone.

In the UK, the coverage is on BBC One and the BBC have unilateral facilities onsite so that they can present their wrap around coverage from the stadium. We also have rights holders providing non-English language commentary and reporting from the mixed zone.

What was your camera set up?

We have around 30 cameras, but many of the cameras have multiple use across the coverage. The cameras consist of a mixture of cabled and RF, with tracking camera on the home straight, a jib on the back straight, steadi cameras, hi motion and SSM, minis for the field events and a stadium beauty camera. There were also some virtual graphics for the field events that required particular lenses.

We used cable and RF to get the feeds to the compound, where the programme is mixed and then distributed via SNG trucks in the compound.

Are there any particular challenges working in this venue?

Time is always tight. The London Stadium has a lot of events taking place and we have to fit in with when the event can access the stadium and when they can then get overlay built for areas such as camera platforms, commentary tribune and mixed zone, before we can then rig. But we had 120 crew across all areas of technical and production, and it went very smoothly.